Dating & COVID-19
The Age of the Shallow Swiping App is Over
How COVID-19 is ushering in a new era of video dating.
Did you know 81% of daters would be willing to go on an in-person date tomorrow if they met someone interesting on a dating app today?
At the start of the pandemic, video was a replacement for real-life interaction. Now, it is a filter to screen potential dates for connection and compatibility before ever meeting in person. Daters no longer have the risk appetite for meeting many different people in person based on a shallow interaction like swiping. They are increasingly demanding a video chat first, to prequalify potential dates.
Three years of changing consumer habits took place in three months, as people got accustomed to livestreaming for everything, including dating. Beyond assessing appearance and personality, video provides an opportunity to assess if a potential date has any obvious signs of illness, like coughing or sneezing.
This shift toward video will extend beyond the pandemic as well. The impact is already being felt far and wide by every dating app in the world. Yesterday, Tinder replaced its CEO with a media executive who led CBS’s push into streaming video.
People will continue to value their time, and they will be habituated to ask for a video chat before an in-person meeting. It’s hard to imagine daters going back to believing a right swipe and a few text chats are enough to justify the time, effort, and physical safety risk of meeting a stranger in person, even after the risk of viral infection is no longer front and center.
My company, The Meet Group, has been building a livestreaming dating platform for more than three years, and today, we are almost certainly the largest provider of livestreaming dating games in the world. Our community plays 185,000 dating games a day, up 95% since the declaration of a pandemic in March. Meanwhile, the total time spent in our video dating features increased by 39% to 1.4 million hours a day, with each person spending on average more than 20 minutes a day.
Our dating game NextDate is like speed-dating but with an audience. People queue up to “date” the streamer who has two minutes to choose Next or Date while the audience can comment and rate the contestant. Our game BlindDate adds a twist: it blurs the video image of the contestant, forcing the first impression to be based on personality rather than looks. We expect to roll out 2 to 3 dating game experiments a year.
We believe livestreaming dating games are the natural successor to linear television dating games. We recently analyzed dozens of television dating games, studying the game mechanics. While there have been many interesting attempts, the one thing they all have in common is stakes: the winning couple wins an all-expense-paid date or a trip. Today, we are excited to begin rolling out our latest dating game experiment, DateNight, to our 5 million daters in the United States. DateNight is the first-ever livestreaming dating game that allows anyone to be the star of their own dating game and win a prize of value.
DateNight provides daters who match during an event the opportunity to redeem a free $10 gift card to one of 18 different national chains when they meet for their first date. We hope to give out as many as 1,500 gift cards a day. That’s up to $100,000 of free first date money per week. DateNight is scheduled for Thursdays from 9:00 pm to 11:00 pm ET. DateNight events are currently set to run at least weekly throughout July and August.
We understand that safety in this pandemic is critically important. To receive a gift card, the two people must meet in person, exchanging Bluetooth permissions from a distance of less than 30 feet. We recommend our community follow all local health guidelines and safety tips, and we chose the 18 chains for their outdoor seating, pickup, and delivery options. Additionally, we allow up to one year for people to redeem their gift cards, so they can date when they are ready. To limit frequent interactions, each dater may redeem only one gift card per week.
We are following the COVID spread closely and based on current guidance expect to hold events only in states where the new case rate is less than 15 per 10,000 people. We also consulted our Safer Dating Advisory Board, comprised of two leading epidemiologists and a doctor of infectious diseases, to help us put together scientifically sound advice that we can share to help minimize risk.
Dating is already back on: Video minimizes risk.
We are not the ones to decide if dating in-person is back on — daters do and they have decided. A July SurveyGizmo survey of an external audience of 1500 US residents interested in dating reveals:
81% of daters would be willing to go on an in-person date tomorrow if they met someone interesting on a dating app today.
What’s more, 25% said they had dated in person in the last 30 days, a figure that is in line with our own internal surveys of our own dating apps’ audience, which suggested 23% had dated in the last 30 days.
The only relevant question is how to keep them safe and minimize risk. To this end, daters are embracing masks, with 71% stating in our survey that they prefer their date to wear a mask. Daters in the survey note there is risk in the supermarket, going to school, going to work, going to the beach, and going on mass transit, and right or wrong, they perceive the nature of those activities to be riskier than a first date.
Video = Safer Dating
Video is a much richer experience than just looking at a person’s potentially old photos and exchanging text chats with the goal of quickly meeting in person. Beyond assessing appearance, personality, sense of humor, and education level, the video also provides an opportunity to assess any obvious signs of illness, like coughing or sneezing. It also provides a forum to ask important questions, like: do you live in a multi-generational household or have contact with people at higher risk of COVID illness, will you wear a mask, or do you take mass transit?
The Mental Toll of COVID on Our Community
Extended isolation has hit people hard, and our community is no exception, experiencing a significant impact on their mental and financial wellbeing. Throughout the pandemic beginning in mid-March, we surveyed our daters to understand how they were coping with this hopefully once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe. In the survey, 50% self-assess that they believe the pandemic is affecting their mental health and 90% of those believe a date would improve their mental health.
We know from experts that COVID is the most universally shared major stressor in decades. Anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and domestic violence are likely to be exacerbated by the pandemic’s epic toll on relationships, finances, health, and even society, with concerns of a societal breakdown about as common as fears of economic carnage. While it’s a small gesture, if an establishment is open and following local virus safety guidelines and we can help people make meaningful connections, that’s about all we can do as a dating app.
Safer Dating in an Age of Pandemic
As part of our launch considerations, we engaged a Safer Dating Advisory Board of epidemiologists and infectious disease experts to promote safer dating. We caution our community to abide by local warnings and protocols, to pre-screen dates on video, to discuss COVID risk factors openly and honestly, to avoid dating when sick or after coming into contact with a sick person, to keep initial dates in public and outside, to minimize time spent inside and always wear a mask, to follow common-sense safety precautions like hand washing, and to be choosy with who you meet.
Additionally, we are allowing daters up to a year to redeem a gift card, so that they can date when they are ready, and we restrict gift card eligibility to one date per week per person. Based on current guidance, we expect to not hold DateNight events in states where the new case rate exceeds 15 per 10,000 people. To promote physical safety, we provide everyone in our community with free access to the UrSafe app.
Conclusion
The pandemic has marked the end of the age of the shallow swiping app and the beginning of the era of video dating. Dating apps have been evolving toward ever-increasing authenticity for years, and nothing is more authentic than live video. The pandemic pulled the future forward, dramatically increasing livestreaming adoption and permanently changing consumer habits. We are proud to hasten the future of dating — leveraging video as a filter for in-person interaction and allowing anyone to be the star of their very own dating show.
We hope our latest dating game experiment, DateNight, will live up to the great promise of dating apps: to engineer serendipity, make meaningful connections, and lead two people to find the spark to kindle a lifetime of love.
Why Video Chat is Replacing Swiping …
Watch this interview for more thoughts on adding video to dating and what it takes to build a livestreaming dating game.
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